Saturday, 28 July 2012

Though the book is known in English as The Leopard, the original title of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel Il Gattopardo in fact refers to a serval (Leptailurus serval). A savanna cat rarely
seen north of the Sahara, the serval has a few remaining North
African ranges, one of these bordering on Lampedusa in Sicily, where the
great historical novel is set. This animal figures in the coat of arms
of the Tomasi family.

We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be
little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and
sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

__

Don Fabrizio had always known that
sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital
fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the
will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as
grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried,
unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hourglass. In some moments of
intense activity or concentration this sense of continual loss would
vanish, to reappear impassively in brief instants of silence or
introspection; just as a constant buzzing in the ears or the ticking of a
pendulum superimposes itself when all else is silent, assuring us of
always being there, watchful, even when we do not hear it.

They are not "big cats", technically. Body size not much larger than a house cat. But those ears, an especially useful adaptation. And the longest legs, proportionate to body size, of any cat. This creature can go from zero to fifty in a blink, and has a stationary vertical leap of twelve feet. As is said around hoops, those are some hops.

In the Lampedusa text, the thing waiting "to reappear impassively in brief moments of silence or introspection" might indeed be the Last Thing.

For a rodent in the long-grass savanna, the silently watching, listening, waiting Serval might signify that, as well.

I'm so glad and grateful for this. As with the binturong, we used to visit the Serval at Outrage-hiss pets in Chestnut Ridge, NY. Ever since I became a cat owner, I had been aware of her from books, but seeing a Serval up close is absolutely remarkable. My mother had a copy of The Leopard, which now sits on my shelf. I've also known about it (the novel and the Burt Lancaster|Visconti movie) forever and I think I'll finally read it now, if I can put some space between me and some other things. Curtis